


A Spark Will Split Again and Again and Again

by navaan



Category: Sunshine (2007)
Genre: Alternate Reality, Fix-It, Gen, Sort of Timey-Wimey, Time Loop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-25
Updated: 2018-12-25
Packaged: 2019-09-21 10:48:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17042297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/navaan/pseuds/navaan
Summary: He falls into the sun. Even the physicist has problems to explain why it's not the end of the story.





	A Spark Will Split Again and Again and Again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ponderosa (ponderosa121)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ponderosa121/gifts).



> I've been waiting for years to get matched to this fandom. Thank you for making the request and I hope you like it! Happy Yuletide!

The glowing, burning surface was everything; it was burning his eyes, burning his soul. Even now that it was dying it remained the brightest flame in their solar system, remained the center of their world. 

But he was falling towards it, felt the heated fingers of it lick up to meet him.

His mind told him it wasn't possible. He was dead already.

But with gravity and velocity it was like he had thought - time and space smeared together as he was swallowed up whole.

* * *

He woke with a scream in his bunk, wondering how many of the others had heard him. Their habitats were close. On a spaceship with only eight people it was hard to avoid knowing everything about anyone.

He wasn't self-conscious, but he had never dealt well with people.

When he sat up someone walked into the hatch to poke their head in. "Nightmare?"

He was surprised to see it was Mace. The man was a competent engineer, brilliant when push came to shove, but Capa found his tough talk hard to bear sometimes. 

"Yes," he admitted, and wondered why he thought Cassie should have been the one to ask.

"Don't beat yourself up about it," Mace said, voice level. "We all have them."

"You do?"

"We all do," Mace repeated; he looked like a man who had lingered enough in the half dark, ready to turn and leave.

"Of the sun?" Capa asked, because he wasn't sure what other people's nightmares looked like. His sister said he'd had night terrors as child, but he had no recollection of it.

Maze shrugged. "I dream of the cold. Everything going dark. Freezing."

_When the sun goes out._

Capa thought about his sister and her kids, about the last time they had waved at him before he'd set out to go on the Icarus II. Sydney had been covered in snow and ice.

He nodded.

"We can't fail," he said, before Mace nodded and move to slip out again. "I'm sorry, you know?" Capa added before he could go. "I didn't know what to say. It was selfish."

He'd meant to apologize before. 

"It _was_ selfish." Mace said. His voice was the hard, unforgiving edge he got when he thought they needed to make a tough call. "Apology accepted."

He slipped out and Capa, legs propped out on the relative softness the bunk provided. 

Two days later they docked with the Icarus I and their mission became a new one: survive long enough to save everyone else.

* * *

The sun rushed up to meet him, fire licking at his heels; hydrogen and helium were fusing over and over again as the fuel was running out. A bomb was all the hope left, but why was he falling? Why was he not strapped to that bomb. His own scream rang loud in his ears.

* * *

He expected Mace to be the first to complain about Tray making them chicken for the third time in a row. 

"Where's Mace?" he asked when Searle sat down and started a long winded discussion with their engineer Lacey Wong. 

"Who?" John, their botanist, asked, with a distracted frown.

As soon as he tried to ask again the thought slipped from him.

_Who?_

He listened with a sigh as Searle talked about bathing in sunlight, building a concept of light and darkness that to his physicist mind had all the usual trappings of a psychological thesis. Then John picked up the threads and shared his own experiences on the observation deck. 

Cassie was the first to get up and leave the table. 

They were all scientists here. They had all heard enough about belief that god's will had put them where they were now and that whether their mission succeeded or failed - it would be _his_ will.

Capa silently got up to follow Cassie. How had he ended up listening to this kind of talk every time they had lunch together? He looked at the sun and saw dying star. He looked at his place in all this and saw himself strapped to the back of a bomb powerful enough to create a new sun. 

This was science and more than any of the other astronauts here he understood what would happen once their payload was delivered - and all the variable that they could only guess at.

God wasn't in those numbers. And if he existed how could this be his will?

He asked himself the same thing, when two days later the mainframe died.

* * *

His screams sounded loud and yet couldn't be heard. Or perhaps they could be heard and not heard at the same time. Only his ears are there to hear them. The dying star that was consuming him didn't care. Time stopped and rushed on. The stellar bomb explodes. Light withing light within light and a scream shattered across space and time.

* * *

"It's different now that we know we won't come back." Cassie said. She had come to look for him and he had given her access. After the oxygen garden had burned out, all of them needed time to process. 

Without oxygen they would not survive the track home.

"Our survival depends on the delivery of the payload," he said reasonably. There was no point in giving up.

"Not ours," she said, but she wasn't disagreeing. 

They were still saving the world and all the people they had left behind on Earth. 

"When the stellar bomb ignites," he said, "nothing will happen for a moment. And then a single spark will appear and float in space and then it will split, again and again and again..."

He wanted to explain to her that was afraid of dying but he had known that was a possibility. After all the crew of the Icarus I had been lost.

"What is it, Capa?" Cassie asked and he realized he'd stopped.

Déjà vu.

Not a concept he believed in.

And yet he knew he had told her this before.

Before falling into the sun.

In a quiet voice, he explained how the stellar bomb would recreate a big bang event on a smaller scale, ignite another star that would grow inside the sun and feed, consume it, survive it - and become their new sun.

* * *

Kaneda must have died like this. Consumed by the fire of light. A shadow eradicated by light.

Capa fell, sure when the last atoms of what he had once been were blown across the universe, that this wasn't the first time.

* * *

The fire bled out the reality of it.

By the third time he had given up on the concept of "Déjà vu" and instead drew himself an untidy model of alternate realities stacked into each other. He didn't remember enough to make sense of it, only remembered bits and pieces of a picture that to him now was smears of base colors without form that an artist would turn into landscapes and shapes later.

"What's that?" Searle asked, when he came to visit. Mace was standing in the lab waiting for them to come along.

"That's me relaxing."

"Try the earth room," Searle suggested.

He nodded, but had no real need of the Earth room. He watched Maze step closer. "Meeting at 09:00."

He got up to clear the marks he'd made on the board and tried to put alternate realities out of his mind. One reality was complicated enough at their odds.

Two days later, he went to look for Mace who was running maintenance on the mainframe. Corazon had looked at him strangely when he'd volunteered.

They hadn't even fought. Yet.

Before he reached Mace he heard the clatter of metal, heard Icarus state warning and hear Mace curse loudly.

By the time he rounded the corner, he saw, Mace hold his arm close to his chest. Drenched.

"Is that why you're afraid of the cold?" he asked, remembering the man's last words that he'd heard in variations again and again and again as he must have died right next to this very same mainframe.

"No," Mace said and their eyes met.

Only now did Capa remember, they'd never had the conversation. 

_Does he remember?_ he thought. 

It was unlikely. 

After all Capa had trouble to make sense of his moments of Déjà vu.

As it played out, the crew dying one by one, oxygen running out, Pinbacker killing them off, Cassie crying out, Maze warning him, Icarus failing, he let himself fall into the sun with the bomb, sparks flying around him as he ended his existence the center of a new born star.

 _Why do I never wake soon enough?_ his atoms sing as he withered away, as smear on the surface of time.

* * *

He woke from a nightmare the day before Harvey told them this was the last chance they had to send messages home. This time he stepped in and started: "Mom, Dad, Sis, I know exactly what to tell you. By the time you get this message, I'll be in the dead zone. It came a little sooner than we thought, but this means you won't be able to send a message back. So, I just wanted to let you know that I don't need the message, because I know everything you wanna say. Just remember, it takes eight minutes for light to travel from sun to Earth, which means you'll know we succeeded about eight minutes after we deliver the payload. All you have to is look out for a little extra brightness in the sky. So if you wake up one morning and it's a particularly beautiful day, you'll know we made it. Okay, I'm signing out, and I'll see you in a couple of years." The last message was still in his head, because he's spoken it before. And so he told them how they wouldn't be able to answer them, but how they would know if he had made it.

And whatever happened, he knew he would.

But this time it wasn't too late to twist things along a different path.

Capa stepped out of the cabin 20 minutes after stepping in. Mace was still there waiting for his turn to come up after Harvey and Coracon. Only now, Capa realized he had no idea how many people were waiting for Mace. Mother? Father? Brother? Wife? Boyfriend. Capa knew about a sister - the one thing they seemed to have in common.

This time Mace would send his package. His folks would know he was on the way to save them all.

Without the argument, tension didn't rise. Harvey seemed quiet. Searle obsessed with the sun. Kaneda worried.

"He's reviewing the last messages of the Icarus I," Coracon said to Mace. 

"He's the ship's captain. It's his job to be prepared."

"And we all can't help but wonder," Cassie added. "What tripped them up? Why did they never reach the sun?"

Capa had an idea. That was why he kept out of that conversation. His eyes met Mace's.

It was 6 hours till Mercury. They watched its orbit against the sun together - a group pushed together by necessity, closing in on their missions target, united in their quiet awe of seeing the little planet, running around the edges of their dying star reaching out at it with extending mass. 

An hour later Harvey called them together to share a discovery: the distress beacon of the Icarus I. Suddenly, the decision was Cap's.

That night, simulations running through his head, no decision made because he didn't _know_ but _felt_ he needed to reach for the right answers and unable to act on a feeling, Capa dreamed of light and shadow, the sun eating him whole. He got up and walked to Searle's little office, empty at this time of their simulated day. 

The Earth room was running.

"Who is it?"

"Mace," Icarus answered quietly.

"Come in." Mace must have heard him. Or he may have heard Icarus. 

"I don't want to intrude." They weren't on the best of terms most of the time.

"Come in. I can't sleep either."

It was the last they said to each other, as they let simulated waves brush over them, hearing them, smelling them, even though they were nothing but projections. 

He wondered why Mace had chosen waves.

Uncontrollable and loud. 

But then he realized, he wanted to see them again.

Hear them.

Feel alive.

"It's not too late," Mace said and then shook his head as if he had lost the train of thought.

And this time, Capa realized, it wasn't. But he was left to wonder how much Mace remembered of what had never happened.

"What do you think I should do?"

"You already know," Mace said, his expression tightening. "We have one mission."

"We will only have one shot at it, if we don't make the detour."

"I know what Searle said. I know the captain wants to make sure we don't fail like they did. But when you say our chances rise with a second payload - I get it. You're a physicist. I'm an engineer. How many unknowns are there in our mission?"

"Projection for the final ignition are..."

"Impossible? I can't even follow it. But _you_ know. That's why you're here. Tell me what will happen if we get there."

"Hard to say," he voiced what he'd been trying to solve for hours. "Between the boosters and the gravity of the sun the velocity of the payload will get so great that space and time will become smeared together and everything will distort. Everything will be unquantifiable. Icarus can't give me a reliable projection. It's not a decision, it's a guess."

"No, it's not." A wave crashed up and the group of people projected in front of them laughed and giggled. 

The exuberance of life was breath taking. 

"What do you mean?"

"You're the smart one," Mace said with a hint of coldness. "Are you afraid of your bomb?"

"What?"

"Of your bomb? Is it what gives you nightmares?"

He didn't hesitate: "No."

"Why? I'll tell you why: You're the only person who knows what'll happen when we finally get there to deliver it. Now tell me. Are you scared? Why aren't you?"

"When a Stellar Bomb is triggered, very little will happen at first -and then a spark, will pop into existence, and it will hang for an instant, hovering in space and then, it will split into two, and those will split again, and again, and again... detonation beyond all imaging - the big bang on a small scale. - a new star born out of a dying one... I think it will be beautiful... No, I'm not scared."

"There you have it," Mace said watching the waves with a calmness he hadn't shown when they discussed the distress beacon hours before. "That's what you know. What do we truly know about what we'll find on the Icarus I?"

"Nothing," he admitted after a moment of thinking.

"Searle says two last chances are better than one. I say a last chance is high stakes to throw away for no guarantees."

Perhaps this was the longest conversation they'd ever had.

Their eyes met.

Something sprang over. A spark of knowledge. And then it split.

"Thank you," he said to Mace and he nodded back.

He walked out of the Earth Room hoping that this was the last time his atoms would lead the way back to the beginning.

* * *

Eighteen months later, eight astronauts found their way home.

It was a sunny day over the Pacific.


End file.
